Aakash 2: Challenging to make a quality tablet @ Rs 2276

Chinese PC maker Lenovo on Wednesday said it may look at the proposition of a participation in India's Aakash tabletproject, though it would be difficult to produce a tablet with a great user experience at the proposed price of Rs 2276 ($41).

"We are aware of the project and looking at that proposition. We don't disclose about tenders we are participating. In my personal view, it's very challenging to produce a tablet at that price, which can carry a great customer experience," said Keith Liu, Business Development Director for Mobile Internet Digital Home division at Lenovo across Asia Pacific & Latin America regions.

Liu heads the tablet business for Lenovo, second largest tablet player in China after Samsung. "As a person who studies the tablet market closely, I can say that the bill of materials will be high if you want to produce a quality tablet. At that (proposed) price, you may have to make the tablet limited in certain ways and functions," Liu said.

India's Aakash tablet project is envisaged by its Ministry of Human Resource and Development. It plans to distribute about a million tablets in colleges in the coming years, at a procurement price per tablet of Rs 2276 ($41). It has awarded a contract for 100,000 tablets to UK'sDatawind, which is under testing phase at IITs since a year.

The limitations on price has made many large tablet players such as Samsung, Dell, Lenovo and HCL to not participate in the past tablet tender. The world's tablet market is expected to cross about 45 million tablets this year. India is expected to sell about 1.5 million tablets in 2012.

"Besides cost, repair of a tablet currently is a large percentage of the actual price. Servicing the tablets can cause the margins to easily dip into negative territory," he added. The Aakash project being run under India's National Mission for Education through ICT, mandates the contracted party to also handle the service and support for the tablets.

"We are instead bringing out tablets with all the features which we think will be great for the user at retail and corporate levels," Liu said. Lenovo became the largest PC seller in India last quarter beating leader Dell. The firm will launch its ThinkPad 2 tablet next month on Windows 8 Pro, expected to be priced upwards of Rs 10,000 depending upon memory size and OS version.

Lenovo is setting up its global tablet manufacturing facility at Wuhan in China.

India is however insisting on a made (or assembled) in India stamp for its cheapest tablet project. IIT Bombay is currently testing the Aakash tablets which are assembled in Hyderabad. The IIT has proposed to upgrade the tablet features to 1GHz processor, from the current 800 MHz processor. It has also proposed to upgrade the operating system from Android 2.2 to Android 4.0 for the same price of Rs 2276.